On Leisure

...they commend our vices to us with a great show of agreement. Even if we attempt nothing else that might be wholesome, withdrawal will of itself do us good: we shall be better men in isolation. And what of the fact that we are free to withdraw to the company of the best men, and to choose some model by which to direct our lives? But this cannot be done except in leisure. Then alone can the resolve we once formed be held fast, when no one intervenes to wrench aside, with the crowd's connivance, a judgement still too weak to stand. Then alone can life proceed on a level and unbroken course, the course we shatter by setting ourselves the most contradictory aims.

For among all our other evils this is the worst, that we change our very vices. We are not even allowed to persevere in an evil that has grown familiar. One thing after another takes our fancy, and we are tormented by this too, that our judgements are not merely warped but fickle. We are tossed about and snatch now at one thing, now at another; we abandon what we sought and seek again what we abandoned; we swing between our craving and our regret.

For we hang wholly upon the judgements of others, and what wins the most suitors and applauders seems to us the best, rather than what deserves to be praised and sought after. We do not reckon a road good or bad by its own merits, but by the multitude of footprints upon it, among which there are none of any who turned back.

You will say to me: "What are you doing, Seneca? Are you deserting your party? Surely your own Stoics declare: 'To the very end of life we shall be in action; we shall not cease to labour for the common good, to help each man, to bring aid even to our enemies with a hand grown old in service. We are the ones who grant no exemption for any number of years, and who, as that most eloquent of men puts it, press the helmet down upon our grey hairs. We are the ones with whom nothing before death is so given over to leisure that, if circumstance permits, death itself is not at leisure.' Why do you preach to us the precepts of Epicurus in the very headquarters of Zeno? If you are weary of your party, why not honestly desert it outright rather than betray it?"

For the present this shall be my answer to you: "Do you want anything more of me than that I should show myself the equal of my leaders? What then? I shall go, not where they have sent me, but where they have led me."

Now I shall prove to you that I am not deserting the precepts of the Stoics; for they themselves have not deserted their own. And yet I should be wholly excusable even if I followed, not their precepts, but their example. What I am saying I shall divide into two parts. First, that a man may, even from his earliest years, give himself up wholly to the contemplation of truth, may seek out a rule for living and practise it in retirement.

Second, that a man may, once his term of service is completed and his years far spent, do this with the fullest right and turn his mind to other pursuits, after the manner of the Vestal Virgins, who, with their years apportioned among their several duties, first learn to perform the sacred rites and, once they have learned, teach others.

I shall show that this is acceptable to the Stoics as well, not because I have laid down for myself the law of committing nothing contrary to a pronouncement of Zeno or Chrysippus, but because the matter itself permits me to side with their view; for whoever always follows one man alone is a member, not of a senate, but of a faction. Would that all things were already grasped, that the truth lay open and confessed, and that we changed nothing in our doctrines! As it is, we are still in search of the truth together with the very men who teach it.

On this very question two schools above all are at variance, the Epicureans and the Stoics, but each sends us to leisure by a different road. Epicurus says: "The wise man will not approach public affairs, unless something intervenes"; Zeno says: "The wise man will approach public affairs, unless something prevents him."

The one seeks leisure on principle, the other for a reason; and that reason has a wide application. If the commonwealth is too corrupt to be helped, if it is in the grip of evils, the wise man will not strive to no purpose, nor spend himself where he can do no good. If he has too little authority or power, and the commonwealth will not admit him, if his health hinders him,

then, just as he would not launch a battered ship upon the sea, just as, were he disabled, he would not enrol his name for military service, so he will not set out upon a course that he knows to be unworkable. Therefore even the man whose resources are still wholly intact can, before he meets any storms, take his stand in safety, devote himself at once to the noble arts, and pass an unbroken leisure as a cultivator of the virtues, which can be practised even by those who live in the deepest quiet.

For this, surely, is what is required of a man: that he be of use to his fellow men, if possible to many, if not, to a few, if not, to those nearest him, if not, to himself. For when he makes himself useful to others, he carries on the common business. Just as the man who makes himself worse harms not only himself but also all those whom, had he made himself better, he might have benefited, so whoever serves himself well does others good by this very fact, that he is preparing one who will be of service to them.

Let us embrace in our minds two commonwealths: the one great and truly common, which holds gods and men together, in which we look not to this corner or to that, but measure the bounds of our state by the sun; the other, the one to which the accident of our birth has assigned us. This will be the commonwealth of the Athenians, or of the Carthaginians, or of some other city, one that belongs not to all men but to a certain few. Some men at one and the same time serve both commonwealths, the greater and the lesser; some serve only the lesser; some only the greater.

This greater commonwealth we can serve even in leisure—indeed, perhaps better in leisure—so that we may inquire what virtue is, whether it is one or many; whether it is Nature or art that makes men good; whether this single thing that embraces seas and lands, and all that is set within seas and lands, is one, or whether God has scattered abroad many bodies of its kind; whether all the matter from which all things are begotten is continuous and full, or broken up, with void mingled among the solid bodies; what God is—whether he idly surveys his own work or directs it; whether he is poured round it from without or infused throughout the whole; whether the universe is immortal, or is to be counted among things that perish and are born for a season. And the man who contemplates these things—what does he render to God? This: that such great works of his should not be without a witness.

We are accustomed to say that the highest good is to live in accordance with Nature. Nature has begotten us for both ends, for the contemplation of things and for action. Let us now prove what I said before. Why, will not this be proved if each man only consults himself, and asks how great a craving he has to know what is unknown, how he is stirred by every tale?

Some men go to sea and endure the hardships of the longest voyage for the single reward of coming to know something hidden and remote. It is this that draws whole peoples together to the public spectacles; it is this that compels men to pry into things shut away, to search out what is more secret, to unroll the records of antiquity, to listen to the customs of barbarous nations.

Nature has given us an inquiring mind, and, conscious of her own skill and beauty, she begot us as spectators of her mighty pageant, since she would lose the fruit of herself if works so vast, so resplendent, so finely wrought, so radiant and beautiful in more ways than one, were displayed to an empty solitude.

That you may know she wished to be not merely glanced at but truly beheld, see what a place she has given us. She has set us in the very midst of herself and granted us a view in every direction; and she not only raised man upright, but, in order to make him fit for contemplation, so that he might follow the stars as they glide from their rising to their setting and turn his face round together with the whole heaven, she set his head on high and placed it upon a supple neck. Then, leading six constellations by day and six by night, she unfolded every part of herself, so that through these things which she had set before his eyes she might awaken in him a longing for the rest as well.

For we do not see all things, nor things as great as they truly are; but our keen sight opens for itself a path of investigation and lays the foundations of the truth, so that the inquiry may pass from what is plain to what is obscure and may discover something older than the universe itself: whence those stars came forth; what the state of the whole was before the several parts withdrew into their places; what principle drew apart what lay sunk and confused; who assigned to things their stations—whether heavy bodies sank down and light ones soared up of their own nature, or whether, beyond the thrust and weight of bodies, some higher force laid down the law for each; and whether that is true which most strongly proves that men are of a divine spirit—that a part, like certain sparks of the heavenly bodies, leapt down to earth and there clung fast in an alien place.

Our thought breaks through the ramparts of the sky, and is not content to know only what is shown to it. "I am searching out," it says, "what lies beyond the world: whether it is an unfathomed waste, or whether this too is shut in by its own limits; what the aspect of the things excluded may be—whether they are shapeless and confused, holding just as much room in every direction, or whether they too are arranged in some order; whether they cleave to this world of ours or have withdrawn far from it and roll about in a void of their own; whether the atoms are indivisible, out of which is built up all that is and shall ever be, or whether their matter is continuous and changeable throughout; whether the elements are at war with one another, or do not fight but conspire together through their very differences."

Born to seek out these things, reckon how little time he has received, even if he claims it all for himself. Though he allow nothing to be filched from him through easy compliance, suffer nothing to slip away through neglect, though he guard his hours with the utmost miserliness and advance to the very last limit of human life, and though fortune shake nothing loose of what Nature has appointed for him, still man is too mortal for the knowledge of things immortal.

Therefore I live in accordance with Nature if I have given myself wholly to her, if I am her admirer and her worshipper. Now Nature willed that I should do both—both act and have leisure for contemplation. And I do both, since not even contemplation is without action.

"But it makes a difference," you say, "whether you have approached contemplation for the sake of pleasure, seeking nothing from it but unbroken contemplation with no outcome; for it is sweet and has its own allurements." To this I answer you: it makes just as much difference in what spirit you lead the life of a citizen—whether you are forever restless and never take any time in which to turn your gaze from things human to things divine.

Just as to grasp after things with no love of the virtues and no cultivation of the mind, and to perform mere bare deeds, is by no means to be approved—for these things ought to be blended and woven together—so virtue cast into a leisure without action is an imperfect and feeble good, never displaying what it has learned.

Who denies that virtue ought to test its progress in actual work, ought not merely to ponder what is to be done, but at times also to put its hand to the task and bring what has been pondered to realization? But if the delay lies not with the wise man himself, if it is not the doer that is wanting but the things to be done, will you not allow him to be alone with himself?

In what spirit does the wise man retire into leisure? In the knowledge that even there he will be doing things by which he may benefit those who come after. We, certainly, are the ones who say that both Zeno and Chrysippus accomplished greater things than if they had led armies, held office, and passed laws. And laws they did pass—not for a single state, but for the whole human race. What reason is there, then, why such leisure should not befit a good man, the leisure through which he may order the ages to come and address, not a handful of men in assembly, but all the men of all nations, those who are and those who shall be?

In short, I ask whether Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Zeno lived by their own precepts. You will answer without hesitation that they lived just as they had said one ought to live. And yet none of them governed a commonwealth. "They had not," you say, "the fortune or the rank that is usually required for admission to the conduct of public affairs." But these same men nonetheless led no idle life: they discovered how their own repose might profit mankind more than the rushing about and sweat of others. Therefore these men were seen, none the less, to have accomplished much, although they did nothing in public office.

Furthermore, there are three kinds of life, and men are wont to ask which of them is the best. One is given over to pleasure, the second to contemplation, the third to action. First, having laid aside our contention and that implacable hatred we have declared against those who follow other paths, let us see how all these come, under one title or another, to the same end. The man who approves of pleasure is not without contemplation; the man who is devoted to contemplation is not without pleasure; nor is the man whose life is set apart for action without contemplation.

"There is the greatest difference," you say, "whether a thing is the chief aim or the accessory of another aim." Granted, the difference is great; yet the one does not exist without the other. The one man does not contemplate without action, nor does the other act without contemplation; nor does that third man, of whom we have agreed to think ill, approve of an idle pleasure, but of one which he makes secure for himself by reason.

So this very sect of pleasure is itself engaged in action. Why should it not be in action, when Epicurus himself says that at times he will withdraw from pleasure and will even court pain, if either regret is likely to attend the pleasure, or a lesser pain is to be taken on in place of a heavier one? To what purpose do I say this?

To make it plain that contemplation is approved by all. Others seek it as an end; for us it is a station, not a harbour.

Add now that, by the law of Chrysippus, a man is permitted to live in leisure—I do not say to endure leisure, but to choose it. Our school deny that the wise man will attach himself to any and every commonwealth; but what difference does it make how the wise man comes to leisure—whether because the commonwealth fails him, or because he fails the commonwealth, if no commonwealth is anywhere to be had? And it will always fail those who seek it too fastidiously. I ask, to what commonwealth is the wise man to attach himself? To that of the Athenians, in which Socrates was condemned and from which Aristotle fled to escape condemnation, in which envy crushes the virtues? You will tell me that the wise man will not attach himself to this commonwealth.

Will the wise man, then, attach himself to the commonwealth of the Carthaginians, in which there is unceasing sedition, in which liberty is the enemy of every best man, in which there is the utmost contempt for justice and goodness, inhuman cruelty toward enemies, and hostility even toward their own people? From this too he will flee.

If I should choose to review them one by one, I should find none that could endure the wise man, or that the wise man could endure. But if that commonwealth which we imagine for ourselves is nowhere to be found, leisure begins to be necessary for all, since the one thing that might have been preferred to leisure exists nowhere.

If someone says that it is best to sail, and then denies that one should sail upon a sea where shipwrecks are wont to occur and where there are frequent sudden storms to sweep the helmsman onto the opposite course, I judge that this man forbids me to weigh anchor, although he praises seafaring.